Text from Merida

“...And then again, there's nothing more suitable for bringing tears to a prisoner's eyes, than those accounts of breathtaking journeys. Since my call-up, I have often missed the cities and landscapes of the world I know - and sometimes that's bitter. But this evening I miss Argentina, the Sahara, all the parts of the world I don't know, the whole earth - and that's much milder, more resigned and hopeless, it's a 'tender suffering' that resembles happiness. It's like missing a life I might have had, when I was 'a thousand Socrates'."

Jean-Paul Sartre
from Hopscotch – Julio Cortazar

Listen, this is just for you, don’t mention it to anyone else, Maga. I was the hollow shape, you used to tremble, pure and free as a flame, a stream of quicksilver, like the first notes of a bird when dawn is breaking, and it’s nice to tell you all this in words that used to fascinate you, because you thought they didn’t exist outside of poetry and that we had every right to use them. Where are you now, where will we be from today on, two points in an inexplicable universe, near or far, two points that make a line, two points that drift apart and come close together arbitrarily (great figures who had made the name of Bueno de Guzman renowned, but how corny can the guy get, Maga, how did you ever get beyond page five…), but I won’t explain to you the things they call Brownian movements, of course, I won’t explain them to you and still both of us, Maga, form a pattern, you a point somewhere, me another somewhere else, displacing each other, you probably now in the Rue de la Huchette, while I am discovering this novel in your empty apartment, tomorrow you in Gare de Lyon ( if you’re going to Lucca, my love) and me on the Rue du Chemin Vert, where I’ve discovered a wonderful little wine, and little by little, Maga, we go along forming an absurd pattern, with our movements we sketch out a pattern just like the ones flies make when they fly around a room, from here to there, suddenly in mid-flight, from here to there, that’s what they call Brownian movement, now do you understand? A right angle, an ascending line, from here to there, from back to front, up, down, spasmodically, slamming on the brakes and starting right up in another direction, and all of this is drawing a picture, a pattern, something nonexistent like you and me, like two points lost in Paris, that go from here to there, from there to here, drawing their picture, putting on a dance for nobody, not even for themselves, an interminable pattern without meaning.

We must learn better
What we are and are not
We are not the wind
We are not every vagrant mood that tempts
Our minds to giddy homelessness.
We must distinguish better
Between ourselves and strangers
There is much that we are not
There is much that is not
There is much that we have not to be.
(From “the why of the wind” Laura Riding)